"... Prominent in those connections is Billy Roper, an Arkansas man who has tied himself to the tea party movement. He’s also the founder of a group called White Revolution, a virulent white-supremacy group. ... 'They’re doing their best to spit-shine their image' but 'They’re not all about cutting taxes.' ...”

By MICHAEL MOORE of the MissoulianOctober 10, 2010

The national tea party movement is deeply tied to some of the nation’s most extreme, right-wing groups, the vice president of a national group that monitors the right said in Missoula on Saturday. Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights made his comments at the annual convention of the Montana Human Rights Network.

“The tea party makes it sounds like they’re all about budget deficits, tax reduction and fiscal responsibility,” said Burghart. “But that’s not true. They’re also about the social elements of the extreme right wing.”

Through a PowerPoint presentation, Burghart then linked – through pictures and words – white supremacists, anti-Semites and militia backers to the various tea party factions.

Burghart identified six main tea party factions, and said five of the six are tied to extremist groups. Only FreedomWorks, founded by former U.S. Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, and financially backed by billionaire Steve Forbes, has steered clear of the extremist groups, Burghart said.

“They’ve stuck to the economic issues,” he said. “The others have provided a platform for these other groups, and in some cases allowed these messages to become what they stand for.”

The five other groups identified in a new report are the Tea Party Express, Tea Party nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet and the 1776 Tea Party. Nationwide, tea party groups have about 2 million activists, Burghart said. In Montana, about 1,000 people belong to one of about 20 tea party chapters scattered around the state.

Those figures come from a report that will be issued by Burghart’s group on Oct. 19, titled “Tea Party Nationalism.”

The report directly links the tea party movement to various members of groups that support white supremacy, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia and radically curtailed immigration laws.

Not long after the tea parties surfaced after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, white-supremacy groups started looking to comb their memberships for new members for their own groups.

“They wanted to co-opt the tea parties,” Burghart said. “And that’s why you see the connections we’ve made today.”

Prominent in those connections is Billy Roper, an Arkansas man who has tied himself to the tea party movement. He’s also the founder of a group called White Revolution, a virulent white-supremacy group.

In South Carolina, a prominent tea party activist is also on the board of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which Burghart said is an outgrowth of the old White Citizens Councils of the south in 1950s and ’60s. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once referred to the WCC as the “uptown KKK.”

“These are not populists of any stripe,” Burghart said. “These are ultra-nationalists defending their pale-skinned power.”

Burghart also focused particular attention on the so-called “Birthers,” a small group that believes that Obama is not an American citizen.

“Five of six of these groups have people at the top who don’t believe the president is an American,” Burghart said.

Many of those people also believe that Obama is a Muslim, he said.

“Only FreedomWorks is the exception to that rule,” Burghart said.

Burghart identified Pamela Geller, part of ResistNet group, as an Islamophobe and Birther. Geller has said there’s no such thing as a “good” Muslim and that Obama may be the illegitimate son of Malcolm X.

“Most of us would say that’s insane, but she has a national platform and gets on television,” Burghart said.

At rock-bottom, Burghart said, the tea party movement is an overwhelmingly white gathering that talks about taxes and finances but seems inordinately fond of social issues embraced by the extreme right.

“They’re doing their best to spit-shine their image,” he said. “They’re not all about cutting taxes.”

He was careful to say, of course, that many tea party members don’t embrace radical beliefs. He also said the tea parties are here to stay.

“The tea parties aren’t going away after the midterm elections, as much as we hope they will,” Burghart said.

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.

It should be noted that the “Tea Party” is actually a collection of several hundred unconnected or very loosely connected grass roots organizations scattered all over the nation.

The one commonality is the universal revulsion of the insane hyper-radical, hyper-extreme demonstrably insane taxation, spending and debt creation the democrat party has inflicted on the nation.

In the effort to smear people who want to reform this madness as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, (insert further childish name calling here)” your evidence is an alleged “white supremacist” once showed up to one of one groups meetings?

Of conspicuous absence in this article is even the attempt at presenting a counter argument to; “Fair taxation, free markets, and constitutional government”

Latest Comments

rebellb
I think Charles Manson and the Manson "Family" were a fascist conspiracy to make the hippies look bad. I suspect Manson himself was programmed. He had been in various prisons, where a lot of brainwashing occurs. While he likely learned mind control techniques there, he was also subjected to them. The film industry is involved in a lot of propaganda to get people to go along with the system. The Spahn Ranch was likely used in many of the Westerns that glorified the genocide of the Native Americans and programmed the minds of many people. Many people who got caught up in the Manson cult were vulnerable and naive people who were looking to escape the authoritarianism of their bourgeois families, but instead got taken in by this brainwashed brainwasher who pretended to be a hippie. The Spahn Ranch likely contained a lot of triggers that might have been used in programming the members of the Manson "Family".

Lyle Courtsal
This guy is not a Christian if he is sending vulnerable people to a stateless person status. A lot of rightwingers who think they're Christians ain't going to make. Remember, thou shalt not kill, by gun or budget cut.

Hank
Oh and further evidence of his being an agent provocateur is quoting an anti-pope of the new Vatican II pseudo-Christianity. It's pretty clear after the Judaeo-Masonic takeover of the Catholic Church with Vatican II that this fully controlled religious entity is being made to be the One World Religion of ecumenism, do as thou wilt and other satanic creeds. SHAME ON CONSTANTINE. I only need use the words of Archangel Michael: Lord rebuke you, alex constantine.

Lyle Courtsal
And I forgot about Luke Elliott Sommer and friends who exposed 65 torture centers mostly in Afghanistan. He came home and exposed them, then he and his associates did a bank job for running money. What most people don't understand is that once you violate a clearance, then they start gunning for you. They ran to Canada and then turned themselves in. Then of course there was the talk about how Sommer was going to use the money to start in the canadian ganja businessl weird how it was that when I posted additional information on wikipedia, it would vanish off the site in about a second. Type it in again and once again, the good stuff on the torture centers would vanish, but the garbage about the canadian pot business would still be there. Weird. . .